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Apache Spark is a framework where the hype is largely justified. It is both innovative as a model for computation and well designed as a product. People may be tempted to compare it with another framework for distributed computing that has become popular recently, Apache Storm for example, with statements like "Spark is for batch processing while Storm is for streaming." But those are entirely different beasts. Storm is a dataflow framework, very similar to the HyperGraph DataFlow framework, and there are others like it. It's based on a model that has existed at least since the 1970s even though its author seems to be claiming credit for it. Spark on the other hand is a novel approach to deal with large quantities of data with complex, arbitrary computations on it. Note the "arbitrary" — unlike Map/Reduce, Spark will let you do anything with the data. I hope to post more about what's fundamentally different between something like Storm and Spark because it is interesting, theoretically. But I highly recommend reading the original paper describing RDD (Resilient Distributed Dataset), which is the abstraction at the foundation of Spark.

This post is just a quick 'how to' if you want to start programming against the popular tech stack trio made up of HDFS (the Hadoop Distirbuted File System), HBase, and Apache Spark. I might follow up with the intricacies of cluster setup some time in the future. But the idea here is to give you just a list of minimal steps that will work (fingers crossed).

Whenever I mention relative file paths, they are to be resolved within the main installation directory of the component I'm talking about: if I'm talking about Hadoop and I write 'etc/hadoop', I mean 'etc/hadoop' under your Hadoop installation, not '/etc/hadoop' in your root file system!

HBase Install

We start with HBase because in fact you don't even need Hadoop to develop locally with it. There is of course a standard package for HBase and the latest stable release (at the time of this writing) is 1.1.2. But that's not going to do it for us because we want Spark. There is an integration of Spark with HBase that is being included as an official module in HBase, but only as of the latest 2.0.0 version, which is still in an unstable SNAPSHOT state. If you are just starting with these technologies you don't care about having a production blessed version. So, to install HBase, you need to build it first. Here are the steps:

Make sure you have the latest Apache Maven (3.0.5 won't work), get 3.3+, if you don't already have it.

Go to the Hbase project directory and build it with:mvn -DskipTests=true installThat will put all hbase modules in your local maven repo, which you'll need for a local maven-based Spark project.

Then create an hbase distribution with:mvn -DskipTests=true package assembly:single You will find tarball under hbase-assembly/target/hbase-2.0.0-SNAPSHOT-bin.tar.gz.

This is what you are going to unpack in your installation directory of choice, say /opt/hbase.

Great. Now you have to configure your new hbase installation (untar of the build you just created). Edit the file /opt/hbase/conf/hbase-site.xml to specify where Hbase should store its data. Use this template and replace the paths inside:

Make sure you can start HBase by running: bin/start-hbase.sh (or .cmd)

Then start the HBase command line shell with:bin/hbase shell and type the command list to view the list of all available tables - there will be none of course.

Spark Development Setup

Spark itself is really the framework you use to do your data processing. It can run in a cluster environment, with a server to which you submit jobs from a client. But to start, you don't actually need any special downloads or deployments. Just including Maven dependencies in your project will bring the framework in, and you can call it from a main program and run it in a single process.

So assuming you built HBase as explained above, let's setup a Maven project with HBase and Spark. Then we'll get some sample data to play with and go over a sample application that makes use of two different approaches in Spark: the plain API and the SQL-like Spark module which essentially gives a scalable, distributed SQL-query engine!

No point repeating the code in its entirety here, but I will show the relevant parts. The Maven pom only needs to contain the hbase-spark dependency:

That will pull in everything you need to load that into a local HBase instance and process it with Spark. That Spark SQL module I mentioned is a separate dependency only necessary for the SQL portion of the example:

There are two other auxiliary dependencies of the sample project: one for CSV parsing and the mJson library, which you can see in the pom.xml file from the Github GIST.

Playing With Some Data

We will do some processing now with some Open Government data, specifically from Miami-Dade County's list of recently arrested individuals. You can get it from here: https://opendata.miamidade.gov/Corrections/Jail-Bookings-May-29-2015-to-current/7nhc-4yqn - export in Excel CSV format as a file named jaildata.csv. I've already made the export and placed in the GIST even though that's a bit of a large file. The data set is simple: it contains arrests for a big part of the year 2015. Each record/line has the date the arrest was made, where it was made, the name of the offender, their date of birth and a list of up to 3 charges. We could for example find out how popular is the "battery" charge for offenders under 30 compared to offenders above 30.

First step is to import the data from the CSV file to HBase (note that Spark could work very well directly from a CSV file). This is done in the ImportData.java program where in a short main program we create a connection to HBase, create a brand new table called jaildata, then loop through all the rows in the CSV file to import the non-empty ones. I've annotated the source code directly. The connection assumes a local HBase server running on a default port and that the table doesn't exist yet. Note that data is inserted as a batch of put operations, one per column value. Each put operation specifies the column family, column qualifier and the value while the version is automatically assigned by the system. Perhaps the most important part in that uploading of data is how the row keys are constructed. HBase gives you complete freedom to create a unique key for each row inserted and it's sort of an artform to pick a good one. In our case, we chose the offender's name combined with the date of the arrest, the assumption being of course that the same person cannot be arrested twice in the same day (not a very solid assumption, of course).

Now we can show off some Spark in action. The file is ProcessData.java, which is also annotated, but I'll go over some parts here.

We have a few context objects and configuration objects that need to be initialized:

A configuration object for HBase will tell the client where the server is etc., in our case default values for local server work. Next line, the Spark configuration gives it an application name and then it tells it where the main driver of the computation is - in our case, we have a local in-process driver that is allowed to use two concurrent threads. The Spark architecture comprises a main driver and then workers spread around in a cluster. A location of a remote main driver might look something like this: spark://masterhost:7077 (instead of "local[2]"). Then we create a Spark context, specifically a JavaSparkContext because the original Scala API is not so easy to work with from Java - possible, just not very user-friendly. Then we create something called a JavaHBaseContext which comes from the HBase-Spark module and it knows how talk to an HBase instances using the Spark data model - it can do bulk inserts, deletes, it can scan an HBase table as a Spark RDD and more. Finally, we create a context object representing an SQL layer on top of Spark data sets. Note that the SQL context object does not depend on HBase. In fact, different data sources can be brought under the same SQL processing API as long as there is some way to "relationalize" it. For example, there is a module that lets you process data coming from MongoDB as Spark SQL data as well. So in fact, you can have a federated data environment using a Spark cluster to perform relational joins between MongoDB collections and HBase table (and flat files and ...).

Now, reading data from HBase is commonly done by scanning. You can perform some filtering operations, but there's no general purpose query language for it. That's the role of Spark and other frameworks like Apache Phoenix for example. Also, scanning HBase rows will give you binary values which need to be converted to the appropriate runtime Java type. So for each column value, you have to manage yourself what its type is and perform the conversion. The HBase API has a convenience class named Bytes that handles all basic Java types. To represent whole records, we use JSON as a data structure so individual column values are first converted to JSON values with this utility method:

We can then filter or transform that data anyway we want. For example:

data = data.filter(j -> j.at("name").asString().contains("John"));

would gives a new data set which contains only offenders named John. An instance of JavaRDD is really an abstract representation of a data set. When you invoke filtering or transformation methods on it, it will just produce an abstract representation of a new data set, but it won't actually compute the result. Only when you invoke what is called an action method, that has to return something different than an RDD as its value, the lazy computation is triggered and an actual data set will be produced. For instance, collect and count are such action methods.

Hadoop

To conclude, I will just show you how to use Hadoop/HDFS to store HBase data instead of the normal OS filesystem. First, download Hadoop from https://hadoop.apache.org/releases.html. I used version 2.7.1. You can unzip the tarball/zip file in a standard location for your OS (e.g. /opt/hadoop on Linux). Two configuration steps are important before you can actually start it:

Point it to the JVM. It needs at least Java 7. Edit etc/hadoop/hadoop-end.sh (or hadoop-env.cmd) and change the line export JAVA_HOME=${JAVA_HOME} to point the Java home you want, unless your OS/shell environment already does.

Next you need to configure where Hadoop will store its data and what will be the URL for clients to access it. The URL for clients is configured in the etc/hadoop/core-site.xml file:

Restarting HBase now will bring you back with an empty database as you could verify on the hbase shell with the 'list' command. So try running the import program and then the "data crunching" program see what happens.